MacFamilyTree Bookmarks

One very nice feature in MacFamilyTree is Bookmarks. You can bookmark people, families, sources and media. You can also use a bookmark to identify the starting person in your family tree.

MacFamilyTree Person Screen

Here you see a Person screen for my starting person. The blue ribbon is the bookmark and the star in this one identifies him as the starting person. When I open this datafile, this is the person who will be displayed. To the right, you are looking at the Persons list and you can see that several people are bookmarked. These are the current priorities in my research. When my priority changes, I can quickly remove these bookmarks and add others. Every person, family, source and media screen has a bookmark in the top right corner. It is gray by default, but when I click to activate it the color changes to blue. Click again to remove the bookmark.

When you click on the bookmark, a small menu panel appears. This is the one you see when you click on an active bookmark. An inactive bookmark has options to add as a bookmark and set the starting person. If you already have a starting person set, clicking this will remove the current one and replace it with this one.

In the example above, I chose the Bookmarks menu option and the larger panel appears listing all of the people currently bookmarked. I only see people because I clicked on the bookmark in a person screen. If I had started in a family screen or a source screen, MacFamilyTree would display the appropriate bookmarks for each.

In this example, you are looking at a bookmarked source. This is a description of my great grandparents golden anniversary celebration and it lists all the people who attended along with how they are related to the happy couple – often with some gossipy notes. It even lists all the food that was served and all the songs that were sung. (Yes, it is a treasure!) As you can imagine, it’s something I review frequently so I copied the text into my source record and bookmarked it. Now I can quickly get to it when I need it. As you can see in the sidebar, the family Bibles are also bookmarked. I’ve also got the photocopies of these Bibles saved – and bookmarked – in the media section.

At the top of right side of the MacFamilyTree screen are several buttons – the second one is for Bookmarks. It will display all the bookmarks you currently have arranged by category along with an Edit item for each category. That Edit item displays a screen similar to this one so you can quickly add/remove bookmarks as needed.

Currently MobileFamilyTree displays bookmarks in the appropriate screens and allows you to turn them on or off with a quick tap. When you open a database and go to the Person view, your starting person appears. Unfortunately, that’s all you can do. Bookmarks could sure make moving around the small screen of a mobile device a whole lot easier so hopefully an upcoming update will add more functionality.

All-in-all, bookmarks make it a whole lot easier to stay on track with my research.